Dead Ringers (14 page)

The faded 1960s split-level she and Julia called home had very little going for it. Their neighbors were mostly old folks and blue-collar families whose houses had been passed down for two or three generations. Backyard cookouts, street hockey, and police responses to domestic disturbances were part of most every weekend, which would be fine if the neighborhood had any idea how to engage with the lesbian couple in the pale blue house on the corner.

The neighbors were perfectly nice, always tried to include them. Julia had grown up in neighboring Chelsea and been tormented all through high school, so she had been stunned by how accepting they all were. But sometimes Audrey grew tired of the awkwardness of even the nicest gestures and wished she had persuaded her bride to settle in Northampton, where families like the one they hoped to build were practically the rule instead of the exception.

But Revere had the ocean, and Audrey could forgive a great deal to be this close to the water. It didn't hurt that they lived half a mile from Wonderland station, so a trip to Boston meant just a few minutes on the blue line. She ran to the end of the street, up a steep section of hill, and then turned toward the beach, a long drag of dingy hotels, condo complexes, restaurants, and houses.

She padded along the road, the soles of her sneakers skidding on sand blown inland with the last storm, and in no time she reached Revere Beach Boulevard. Though the western horizon remained dark, the eastern sky—out over the Atlantic—had begun to lighten, and she turned south to run, passing other early risers, mostly old Sicilian men walking their dogs and young women jogging. Nobody did early morning yoga on Revere Beach. Audrey sometimes had daydreams about California, but Revere wasn't that kind of place.

Now that she could see the waves, hear them crashing, and breathe the salt air, she opened up her stride, cleansing herself. Only then did she allow herself to remember that wash of terrible emotion, to let it back in.

Audrey had felt such things before and knew they were unnatural. Maybe worse than that—maybe evil, if such a thing as evil existed outside the human world. She spent a great deal of her time studying the occult in history books and archaeological files, not to mention debunking the claims of bullshit spiritualists. A childhood fascination with witchcraft had led her into a lifelong study of a wide spectrum of related topics. She had master's degrees in history and sociology, spoke French and German and could read Latin, though she often outsourced translation when delving into a forgotten cult or deciphering some medieval grimoire.

Over the years, she had concluded that magic was mostly gibberish, but that did not mean those who called themselves witches were not dangerous. There were arcane energies in the world, and people sometimes stumbled into the power lines and got themselves or someone else burned. Ghosts fell into another category entirely—Audrey had seen and experienced too much not to believe that spirits sometimes lingered on after death.

As for psychics and mediums … she had exposed dozens of charlatans who took advantage of people's grief and loneliness, but there had been a handful who weren't so easy to dismiss. On the rare occasions when she ran across anyone with a real connection to the dead, she left those individuals to their own devices. If she'd been hired to debunk their efforts, she returned her clients' money and kept quiet about her findings, made excuses that did not involve admitting she believed anyone might be a genuine medium. Any such declaration would be very bad for business, which was also the reason she kept quiet about her own psychic experiences.

They were small things. Over the years she had programmed herself to doubt, and that infected her thought process even when it came to her own experiences. Yes, she could always guess the sex of an unborn child, and her ability to find things others had lost was uncanny, but that didn't make her psychic.

Sometimes, though … sometimes she would get a feeling. She would enter a house or a room or pass over a patch of ground that filled her with joy or dread or confusion and she would
know,
down in her bones, that these emotions belonged to someone else. Whether these were echoes of past events or the powerful emotions of the lingering dead, she never tried to guess. At least half a dozen times she had been in the presence of a self-styled medium and known with utter certainty that there were indeed spiritual echoes in a place. But she had never felt anything like the wave of ugly emotions that had struck her this morning.

Troubled, she ran on, relishing the pumping of her blood and the sound of the crashing waves. The wind cut in across the water and swept over her, but she only picked up her pace, letting the effort warm her.

No way our house is haunted,
she thought.

Trying not to think about it. Trying and failing.

No way
. They had been living in the house more than three years. If some malignant spirit had been left behind by an earlier owner, she would have felt its presence sooner. Julia worked as a copywriter for a Boston ad agency, an ordinary-world job, but she believed in ghosts and she believed in Audrey. The two of them had insisted that the real estate agent search the history of the house to find out if anyone had ever died inside. There were no guarantees, of course. Babies died in their cribs and old folks passed in their sleep—not everything would be in the available records. Julia worried about what she called her wife's “sensitivity,” but they had been satisfied that the house was clean.

Three years, and now this,
Audrey thought, racing along the sidewalk. A pair of fiftyish women were walking a dog ahead and she stepped off the curb, running past them in the street
. It makes no sense
.

Without breaking stride, she returned to the sidewalk. The streetlamps began to flicker off, though the sun had yet to crest the horizon. Down on the beach, a tall guy in a knit cap tossed a Frisbee along the sand for his dog, who darted and barked like a happy maniac. The sight brought a smile to Audrey's lips and finally she felt as if the last of the morning's lingering emotions had bled out of her.

The cramps hit her again.

Hate and hunger like twin daggers in her gut.

She doubled over, moving too fast, and pitched to the sidewalk. Hands too slow to break her fall, she drew them toward her instead, twisted on her side to avoid breaking an arm. Her right knee hit the sidewalk just before her shoulder and then her skull. In the back of her mind, buried deep behind the violent animus that filled her, she realized she had made a mistake. If she'd sacrificed the skin of her palms, risked a broken forearm, her skull wouldn't have struck the sidewalk. Pain shot through her head and she blacked out, coming to a moment later in a fog of ill will. The desire to hurt someone had never been so strong. It seemed to her that only with her hands around a throat or gripping a knife with which she could draw blood—only then could she fill the void that carved itself into her core.

Lying on the sidewalk, she felt the tears burning her cheeks. The emotions frightened and humiliated her.

This is not me,
she thought furiously.
I am not made like this
.

Audrey smelled blood and knew it must be her own. Spikes of pain jabbed her skull and she could feel cold air on her right knee where her yoga pants had torn. Hot blood steamed in the chilly morning air, soaking the fabric. She felt it trickling into her hair, sticky, and she wanted to reach up to touch the spot where she'd banged her head but she worried what she might find.

The hostility roiled in her, ebbing and flowing like the ocean.

“Stop,” she said through gritted teeth, one hand on her belly. The nausea came in waves that matched the surging emotion and she fought them both.

This is not me,
she thought.

Fighting the pain in her skull—real pain that belonged only to her—she used her left hand to push herself up until she could kneel. On hands and knees, body aching, right knee bleeding, she breathed deeply and tried to cycle that poisonous hatred out of her body again.

Glancing up, she saw him.

A homeless man in a long black coat that hung open and flapped in the wind, revealing torn rags for clothes and a lining that seemed woven of impossibly dark shadows. Across his eyes he had tied a filthy strip of a cloth like a battlefield dressing. A blindfold.

A blind man?
she thought.

The blindfolded man—the rag man—cocked his head back and inhaled deeply, breathing in the ocean air. A fresh paroxysm of revulsion and hatred clutched at her. Pain spiked through her skull and her stomach convulsed. Audrey felt bile burning up the back of her throat and she twisted and vomited so hard that her entire body went rigid. Her vision swam with blackness and she nearly fell unconscious again. The smell of vomit forced her to shuffle on her knees, wincing in pain, away from the puddle she had made and she breathed tentatively, afraid she would throw up again.

Distant cries reached her and at first she thought they came from seagulls wheeling overhead. She frowned deeply as she realized the cries sounded muffled, and that they came from straight-ahead.

Again she lifted her gaze and stared at the rag man with his dirty blindfold. He had come no closer but she winced as she realized that she could smell him, and that the stink of him was worse than the smell of the puddle she'd left behind a moment ago. She groaned in disgust and stared at him, stared at the shifting black shadows inside his coat.

The hatred drained out of her and with it that hollowness. Fear slid into the vacancy they left behind and suddenly she wanted to run.

“Stay away,” she said, the pain from smashing her head jabbing into her with every word.

An icy chill swept over her, gooseflesh prickling her skin, but it had not been the wind. This chill had come from inside her.

The sun crested the eastern horizon, out over the water, and she squinted and glanced away from its brightness.

When she glanced up again, the blindfolded man was gone.

 

TWO

As she parked her car around the corner from the Somerville Theater, Tess did her best to fight off the guilt of having left Maddie at home. It wasn't just that she had left her daughter with the babysitter again—though just for a couple of hours today. What troubled her was that she and Nick were going to be together and she had not brought Maddie along. It would have been impossible to have the conversation that needed to take place if her daughter had been there, but she knew she was sinning by omission, not telling Maddie about it.

Tess went to pay at the meter, irritated to find it was one of the old styles, requiring coins. She dug around in the various cup holders in her car until she had enough quarters to buy her an hour and fifteen minutes of parking, plunked the coins into the meter, and then hurried along the street. Her phone marked the time as 11:18
A.M
., nearly twenty minutes after the others would have arrived. She wondered how much Lili would have told them—wondered if Nick and Aaron would even have stuck around after that.

It was Saturday morning in Davis Square. People stood on the sidewalk and read the marquee of the Somerville Theater, which showed movies but also still hosted the occasional concert. Tess and Nick had seen The National there back before Maddie had been born. The lyrics to one song had stuck in her brain.
It's a terrible love and I'm walking with spiders
. The song had resonated with her afterward as she tried to figure out how love could ever be terrible. Eventually she realized that a love full of doubts and reservations could never be anything
but
terrible. Full of spiders.

She waited for the light to cross the street. Hipsters played hacky sack. A little anti-oil demonstration had been set up on the island across from the T station. A white guy with thick dreadlocks played guitar and sang “Skinny Love” with the voice of an angel. Once, Davis Square had been run-down, just a spot students had to pass through on the way to Harvard Square, but now Harvard Square was full of chain stores and business lunches, and Davis had become the home of the authentic hipster. The hippie atmosphere had a vitality that made her glad to be there, no matter the circumstances that had brought her.

On that crisp morning, Davis Square felt solid and real. After the previous evening's events, she needed real.

A chilly breeze whistled along the sidewalk as she made her way toward Diesel Cafe. Tess shuddered and turned up the collar of her jacket, wishing she'd worn a scarf. As she passed a restaurant, she glanced at her reflection in the plate glass window, and it unsettled her to see that ghostly, transparent version of herself. Others passed by in the reflection. She could see them in the glass, crossing the street. A little Volkswagen passed by, itself the ghost of a car.

She reached Diesel Cafe, smiling in spite of her troubles when she saw the rocket ship logo on the front door. She grabbed the door handle, glancing at her reflection in the glass door. Behind her, a woman stood on the sidewalk across the street—a woman her height, with the same curls and the same hue to her skin. A woman with her face.

Tess froze, staring at the reflection of that distant figure. Inside the café, a man tapped on the door and she jumped, startled by the sound.

“Sorry,” he said as he exited the café. “You looked distracted and I didn't want to smack you with the door.”

Tess smiled and brushed it off, barely aware of the words she was speaking. As he left, she held the open door and turned to look across the street just in time to see the woman entering a small stationery store.
Not my imagination,
she thought, but was this really her double, or just a woman with similar hair?

“Tess. You coming in or are you just gonna stand there?”

Blinking, Tess turned to see Lili standing in the open door of the Diesel Cafe. She glanced again at the stationery store, feeling the powerful urge to go over there, to see her double face-to-face, if that had indeed been her double. Her skin prickled with revulsion. If she went over there anything might happen, and she had a daughter to take care of. She told herself it wasn't just the fear that stopped her from investigating.